One of the most popular hosting options for WordPress websites is Managed WordPress Hosting.

There are many options and companies that offer a web hosting service and Managed WordPress Hosting is more expensive than non-managed hosting. Therefore, is Managed WordPress Hosting really worth the cost? In this article, we might help you with the answer.

First, let’s make sure we understand the main difference between managed WordPress hosting and non-managed.

With managed WordPress hosting, the provider takes care of most of the technical tasks and measures of installing and operating WordPress. With non-managed plans, on the other hand, the host will only be responsible for providing and maintaining the server resources, leaving you with the task of setup and maintaining the WordPress installation by yourself.

Let’s take a look at some of the main advantages and features that come with managed WP hosting:

Setup and Migration

  • Managed plans do all the work regarding setting up a brand new website from scratch or migrating an existing website from another web host. A new WordPress installation is usually done automatically and only takes a few clicks! Managed hosting should include free and complete migration assistance from a skilled team.

User-Friendly Control Panel

  • Shared hosting services typically come with cPanel which comes with many features and tools that could be a little confusing for users who have little experience working with this panel. Moreover, managed WordPress plans often come with an easy-to-use custom control panel that only includes tools and functions needed for WP management.

Performance and Speed

  • Managed WP hosting is sold with its servers’ software and architecture optimized to work specifically with WordPress and no other content management system or software. This is translated into significant performance and loading speed improvement.

Caching and CDN

  • Caching and CDN make a big difference when hosting a large e-commerce website that receives thousands of visitors a day.
    By serving static, cached pages that don’t eat up your server’s CPU & RAM, server-side caching can dramatically improve your website’s loading speed. With non-managed plans, you will need to install and configure a third-party plugin in order to achieve this. However, with managed plans, this is already integrated and configurated.
    A CDN (Content Delivery Network) also comes pre-installed and ready to use with fully managed plans. The CDN ensures the fast loading of your website to visitors from around the globe.

Staging Environment

  • A Staging Environment includes a copy of your website that only you have access to. You can use this to design your site, make customizations, add code, test plugins, etc. before applying them to your live website. You can find this standard feature included with managed WordPress.

Advanced Security

  • Being the most popular CMS can also mean it is the most targeted by spammers and hackers. That’s why security is a big concern when working with WordPress.
    To help keep your website secure, the first thing to do is to keep installations up-to-date. Managed hosting saves you from doing that manually by enabling automatic updates to the WordPress core, as well as themes and plugins.
    Besides automatic updates, other security features and protection for your server and website normally include DDoS and brute force protection, malware scanning and removal, file access restrictions, and more.

Experienced Support Team

  • When searching for a web host, the most important thing to keep in mind is having an expert support team that can fix any sort of technical issues on your server or WP installation.
    Managed WordPress hosting should come with a dedicated technical support team.

What about Disadvantages?

  • As we stated before, managed hosting solutions are expensive. It doubles the average amount you’d pay for non-managed services, and a premium service even much more.
  • Another important disadvantage is that you will have to deal with much less access to your server environment and software because most of the server-side configurations will be controlled by the host.
  • In order to answer this article’s question, ‘’is Managed WordPress Hosting worth it?’’ We should think about the main difference, which is that you get a lot more services with managed hosting that can save you a lot of time and can be more helpful. Managed hosting is worth it if you need those features.

 

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